48 Do your own thing with an elegant fling. . . a long and versatile lariat $12.50. "Rhapsody" in the golden manner of Monet. At all fine stores. Mõiiêt@ COPYRtGHT MONET JEWELERS 6 WEST 32 STREET NEW YORK .. .. ... , "'. . -..tt" ., '" , " . .. '.. . ... . ... '**. ... ." .. . .' J =. '. -""' .. 1 . · . '\. .. I ... - . , .. - . .. I- " ..-.,. ''\, !It. \ . .. ,"' 'II . "a-. .' · .. ,." ... if . . !I' . "pi,,'- ".. _ _ JI+. ... It ..-tr'- such widely differing figures be ac- counted for When A M. Rosenthal, the manag- ing edItor of the Times, was asked about the discrepancies in his paper, he eXplained that the December 7 th re- port, which stated, "Twenty-eight Black Panthers have been killed in run- ins with the police since January 1, 1968," was taken from a December 5th story by the same reporter, which said, "According to Charles Garry. . . [Hampton and Clark] were the 27th and 28th Black Panthers killed in clashes wIth the police since] an uary of ] 968," and which was itself based on a telephone conversation with Garry. In the December 7th story, the qual- ifying phrase "according to Charles Garry" had been deleted, Rosenthal said, because "the reporter probably felt the source was unimportant in the second story" -although Rosen- thal, in discussing the matter, said that he personally felt that the reporter should not have turned an assertion by an interested party into a fact. The figure of twenty-eight had subsequent- ly been reported as fact because the reporter "inad verten tly referred to the first figure," and this had happened because "no flag was placed on the error." (Whitne} Young's assertion that "nearly thirty Panthers have been murdered by law-enforcement officials" was based on the Tzmes, according to his research assistant, and the Tzmes was then able to re- port in a Sunday summary that the h f "0 I ." c arge 0 a natIona conspIracy against the Panthers "has been echoed by more moderate civil- rights leaders.") Ben Bagdikian, the national editor of the Washington Post, also named Garry as the source for his news- ... paper's asse rtion that twenty-eight P an the rs had been killed by po- lice-though the only " O fi d o" speCI c ocumentatIon on the subject was the V.P.I. bulletin of December 12th. The V.P .1. bulle- tin, which went out to more than four thousand suhscrihing domestic newspa- pers and broadcasting stations, came from the neWS agenc}'s San Francisco bureau, which, accordIng to Its man- ager, H. Jefferson Grigsby, obtained the list of "victims of cold-blooded murder by the police" from Panther sources. "There was no further dis- patch modifying the December 12th story," Grigsby has noted Garry's list apparen tly provided publications such ... .. as the New Repuhltc, Ramparts, and the New Statesman with the "fact" that twenty Panthers had been killed by police (the figure was published with- out attribution), and Ramparts, in turn, furnished an organization called the Committee to Defend the Pan- thers-whose letterhead included the names of Norman Mailer, I. F. Stone, Ralph Ahernathy, Pete Seeger, Ossie Davis, and Gloria Stein em-with what the committee called the "grim statis- tic" of twenty Panthers dead. Mem- bers of another committee concerned with the treatment that Black Panthers were receiving at the hands of the po- lice-this one set up by former S u- preme Court Justice Arthur Goldherg and Roy Wilkins, of the N.A.A.C.P. -were widely quoted as saying that "twenty-eight" and "nearly thirtv" Pan thers had been "murdered" by po- lice, although Norman C. Amaker, the staff director of the committee, con- ceded that the list on which these state- ments were based "was compiled at the behest of their national attorney, Charles Garry." And so it went. Although Gdrry was certainlv an interested partv in the con- travers} over what came to be called the war between the Panthers and the police, it is clear that his assertions were widely accepted at their face value, so even when modifications were made in the lists of casualties it was Garry's story that was being modIfied, and prac- tically no independent checking was done. How, then, did Garry arrive at his figures? In September, 1970, Garry eXplained to me that he chose the num- ber twenty-eight when newsmen called him for a statement after the shooting of Hamp- ton and Clark because that "s e e me d to he a safe number; " he added that he believtd "the actual number of Panthers murdered by the police is many times that figure." \Vhen pressed for the names, however, Garry found he could "document" only "twenty police murders" of Panthers. The list of "twenty murders," which was sent to me from Garry's office, along with a warning that "the facts are not necessarily empirical," actual- ly cOlnprises only nineteen Panther deaths, and one of the nineteen deaths-that of Sidney Miller, in Se- attle-is attributed by Garry not to po- lice but to "a merchant who claImed he thought Miller was going to rob the store." In the coroner's records, the . .